Cullen Roche: Pragmatic Capitalism

I recorded a great podcast with Peter McCormack when I was in NYC last month. This one was a little different for me and I think you’ll enjoy it. Peter runs the What Bitcoin Did Podcast, one of the few Bitcoin podcasts I listen to regularly. Peter is a Bitcoin maximalist, but embraces his maximalism without a lot of the brash arrogance that you sometimes find in other Bitcoiners. He’s a great guy and very thoughtful. I loved talking to him. We covered a whole range of topics. I think...

I don’t love to forecast the short-term moves of what are inherently long-term financial markets, but I also know we live in the short-term and that perspective provides us with knowledge which helps make us more robust to behavioral mistakes. I hope these 10 questions/answers provide you with some useful perspective on the year to come and that your 2022 is a fantastic one. About Post Author ...

Whew. What a year. Pragcap passed 50 million total page views this year. Crazy. I’ve stopped writing as much in recent years mainly because of some personal stuff and getting bogged down building a damn house, but I am hoping to get back to it more this year so stay tuned. In summary, here’s some of my favorite pieces from this year. Best wishes in 2022. I hope it’s an amazing year for you. Hope is a great strategy. This was a really personal piece and not finance related, but one of the...

Here are some things I think I am thinking about: 1) Bye Bye Bye BBB.  It looks like Build Back Better is getting nuked. Or, at a minimum, reduced. I haven’t talked about this bill that much because I didn’t think it was a hugely important short-term economic driver. To put things in perspective, it was estimated to add $150-200B to the deficit in the next few years. The spending was drawn out over 10 years so even though the trillion $+ bill sounds big it was relatively small when broken...

“Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one’s life or the world at large.” Five years ago I pulled over on the I-5 freeway sobbing. I couldn’t drive. I had been on my way home from a fertility clinic where I’d just learned that it was going to be hard for us to have children. But I still had hope. And so I called the doctor and asked for a more specific answer: Me: “I’m a numbers guy. Shoot me...

Here are some things I think I am thinking about: 1) NYC is ALIVE!  I landed in NYC on Monday morning at 630 AM with a scheduled media spot on the floor of the NYSE at 10:30. I slept in an airport lounge for two hours and then hopped across the river. I’ve been to NYC enough times to know that it always takes longer to get places than you think so I left the airport at 9AM to give myself 90 minutes to get to the NYSE. I figured that was at least a 30 minute buffer. But the city is alive....

Here are some things I think I am thinking about: 1) Good bye Transitory, we barely knew you.  Jerome Powell says the Fed should “retire” the term “transitory”. I like the sound of that. As I said back in July: “My view is that they should stop using this term entirely and try to more accurately communicate inflation and its likely future paths.” This term was always confusing because people perceive inflation as price changes. When gas goes from $3 to $4 and then to $4.25 the Fed would...

I had never watched a Sotheby’s auction live so I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but boy was this exciting. So, long story short – a bunch of crypto enthusiasts created a thing called Constitution DAO. A DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Basically, it is a decentralized organization that operates on the blockchain to achieve some specified purpose. In this case the purpose was to buy one of the only privately owned copies of the Constitution which was...

Here are some things I think I am thinking about. 1) Shadow Stats Debunked! It’s been a huge couple of weeks here at Pragmatic Capitalism when it comes to official myth busting. First we had the money multiplier officially being denounced by the Fed and now we have Shadow Stats officially being debunked. At this rate I won’t have anything to write about in the coming years. Maybe that’s a good thing? Anyhow…. Measuring inflation is hard. Everyone’s experience of inflation is different and...

John Authers has a fantastic piece in Blomberg discussing the return of the Greenspan Conundrum. This is something I’ve mentioned many times in the last few months. I won’t try to rehash all of his points because he does a far better job than I can do. But for those who are too young to remember, the Greenspan Conundrum occurred when Alan Greenspan raised interest rates during the housing bubble. The Fed hiked overnight rates from 1% all the way to 5% and the 30 years Treasury Yield moved...